Galina Arkhipova is an honored teacher of Russia with 64 years of experience, a physicist and an excellent leader. She herself is an avid tourist – she has visited 196 countries, and recently her dream came true – she saw the launch of a rocket from the 700-square-meter Vostochny Cosmodrome. kilometers.
Galina Inokentievna bought a ticket from a Sakhalin travel company. Officials helped her find the city where the next rocket launch would take place. It turned out to be Tsiolkovsky. The flight was delayed twice and the plane ticket had to be changed.
A total of 300 people from different parts of the country came for the space tour.
“The launch of the rocket was scheduled for three o’clock in the morning,” says Galina Arkhipova. They brought us to the city at 11 p.m. The tourists were waiting for the start in the buses. At two in the morning the driver called everyone out. The announcer, in the voice of Levitan, congratulated the audience on the joyful event and began to count down the time until the departure. During this whole hour we were in a state of excitement: what if the rocket didn’t take off?! And so, with a minute left until the start, everyone froze. A second, another – and the rocket rose. The first stage took off and, as we were told, fell in Yakutia. Besides, an outsider will never find it and will not raise it. Before launching a rocket, specialists always calculate the exact place where the steps will fall. By this time, there are already employees who have to collect all the details and bring them back to the spaceport. This is necessary so that the elements of the new fuel and metals do not fall into the wrong hands. In particular, new satellites were sent into space with this rocket.
After the launch in the morning, guests were given a tour of the space museum and the city. The city is named after Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, a Russian and Soviet self-taught scientist. He wrote the book “Out of Earth”, justified the use of rockets for space flights and came to the conclusion that it was necessary to use “rocket trains” (a prototype of multi-stage rockets).
The city appeared in 1961 and was called Uglegorsk. But coal was never mined there. Building missile silos was disguised as coal mining. So a potential enemy does not assume that a missile division is stationed at that location. And only in 2015, the city was named after a famous scientist. Now it is home to about eight thousand people.
The local space museum has Tsiolkovsky’s raincoat and coverall designed for astronauts. By the way, for a six-month stay on the station, each crew member is entitled to 20 to 30 kilograms of clothing. Due to the economy of water in space, the station does not wash it. A package of new stuff is simply opened as needed, and the used stuff is sealed in a sealed container and stored with the rest of the waste on a cargo ship that detaches from the station and burns up in Earth’s atmosphere.
The Angara spacecraft is scheduled to take off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in two years. It will either go to the moon or Mars. Therefore, Galina Inokentievna is already thinking about her next trip.
Darina Derevyagina.